The 200 Mph Club

What It's Actually Like To Drive At 200 Mph

Adrenaline junkies worship 200 mph as a magic number. Why? Outside of race cars, only a handful of elite exotics are capable of reaching this benchmark. And just because you have access to one doesn't guarantee you can take it out and run that quick. At 200 mph, you travel the length of a football field per second. Imagine how much road you burn just getting to that speed, let alone maintaining it.

Fifty miles northeast of Los Angeles lies the Mojave Air and Space Port, a place where there is plenty of road. Best known as the birthplace of SpaceShipOne, the first privately built rocket to carry a man into space, the runway there is over 12,500 feet long, or about 2.5 miles.

I'm at Mojave today not for space travel but for an event organized by World Class Driving, an outfit that gives regular folks the chance to break 200 mph in a supercar. Since 2009, WCD has given more than 150 students a crack at the magic number. A $5,000 tuition fee gets you a day of track time in the “Extreme” program at private airports in Florida or California. That amount might seem high for eight hours of driving, but it's cheap, really, considering how much these beauties retail for.

WCD's fleet of cars range from $80,000 to several hundred thousand dollars each, and the cost of insurance to try a stunt like this privately would be astronomical. The Mercedes McLaren SLR, Ferrari 458 Italia and Lamborghini Gallardo LP-560 all exceed 550 horsepower and are capable of 200 mph in top gear — even faster with a tailwind. And we have a nice tailwind today.

Earlier in the morning, our professional instructors, some of whom have qualified for the Indianapolis 500, led the group through exercises to familiarize us with the performance abilities of the cars. Participants need not be skilled racers because they primarily accelerate in a straight line. But even a straight line at those kinds of speeds requires driving skill, not to mention cojones.

In the first exercise, orange cones are placed strategically on the wide tarmac (the runway is 200 feet across), and each of us takes turns at a high-speed 90-degree sweeper followed by rapid acceleration. The procedure teaches us how to enter onto the main runway for our high-speed runs without spinning wheels (and therefore losing critical entry speed) when exiting the corner.

The second exercise has the group meandering through cones on a giant slalom course. Once we pass all the markers, we rapidly pick up speed and, at the final set of cones, brake. But stopping too fast will throw the car's weight forward, which can cause a spin, so we learn how to pump the brakes gradually. Nobody wants a spin-out at 200 mph.

Stanley Soldz, a past customer (he has participated in WCD's city tour programs in Georgia, Arizona and Hawaii) and a Ferrari owner, was excited but also apprehensive. His top speed in a car so far: 135 mph. "If I didn't at least try this, I would always be saying woulda, coulda, shoulda," says the 48-year-old financial officer of Global Commerce, Inc., an IT company in Fredericksburg, Virginia. "This is not something the normal person can do legally, or even illegally."

There were also the AutoBlog TV hosts Jessi Combs and Patrick McIntyre. Their show, 1001 Things To Do Before You Die, has already had them race in the Baja 1,000, drive a tank and cruise the Pacific Coast Highway. But this is the couple's first shot at real speed.

At lunch in a large tent at the end of the runway, lead instructor Roland Linder lays out the plan for the afternoon. We will each get three attempts on the main runway with an instructor coaching from the passenger seat. "We're not in competition," Linder says seriously. "If you don't feel comfortable, slow down. This is fun, but it is dangerous. Listen to your instructors! You may not understand why they tell you to do something, but just do it. They know what's best."